8) As of every new version of Ubuntu, there are some minor bugs in the system. This time again is the sound card volume control. If you find you have a gray out speaker in your Indicator Plugin, you may try this.

If you are using a laptop like me, you may have ran into a problem of the hotkey on your keyboard is not controlling the sound card that you are using when you have multiple sound cards.

It is because XFCE has chosen the HDMI output as my default sound card, so whatever I press, it is just changing the HDMI output but not my headphone/speaker output.

1a) Open “Volume Control” -> “Output device”
1b) Set “Built-in Audio Analogue Stereo” as fallback by clicking the green tick.
1c) Remember the sound card name that you want to set as default, it will be useful in the next step.

2a) Go to “Settings Manager” -> “Settings Editor” -> “xfce4-mixer”
2b) Now, recall the name of your sound card. eg. mine is “”Built-in Audio Analogue Sereo”
2c) Then add “Playback” in front, add “PulseAudioMixer” at the back, and remove all space and ‘-‘ in between, so the result will be PlaybackBuiltinAudioAnalogueStereoPulseAudioMixer
2d) Put this string and replace the original one in “active-card”
2e) Logout and login, then you are done.

NFS (Network File System) allow user to share files between computers. The way I am going to setup is the simplest, but no security at all. You are warned!!!
The system I am using is Xubuntu 12.10, however, should be fine with older Ubuntu or other distributions.

Like this:

I love light weight desktop environment. Fluxbox was used to be top of my list when I only have desktop computers. Then I give up, to make it simple, it is because Fluxbox is not laptop and Chinese friendly. And I don’t want to spend too much time to find out how to get it fix.

So the next best in my list is XFCE at the moment. Firstly, light weight, although nothing close to Fluxbox. And most things are work out of the box.

The only slight annoying thing is: “Desktop icon text would not display in full”.
Default settings in XFCE only display the text in a single line and only the fist few characters.
To fix it first create/edit the file:

vim ~/.gtkrc-2.0

Then add the following lines:

style "xfdesktop-icon-view" {
# 0 = show line in multiple lines
# 1 = show line only in one line
XfdesktopIconView::ellipsize-icon-labels = 0
XfdesktopIconVIew::cell-spacing = 6
XfdesktopIconView::cell-padding = 6
# Ratio between icon and text area size,
# In this example the text area is 5 time wider then the icon image
XfdesktopIconView::cell-text-width-proportion = 5
}
widget_class "*XfdesktopIconView*" style "xfdesktop-icon-view"

I could not confirm, but I think all those value above have to be integer in order to work.
Of course you can try thing out.

And to load the new settings, you don’t have to log out and log in again, just run this command

Like this:

If you have only one scanner but many computers, what is the easiest way to share it? Connect it to one computer and set that computer to be a server, then control the scanner over the network.

<—– Server Side —–>
First, make sure your scanner is working on the server computer. If you are using a USB scanner like me, just connect and preform a scan on the server to make sure it is working. In Ubuntu, Simple Scan is the default program, and it is the best scanning software I think.

Install the required software on the server:

sudo apt-get install sane-utils

Edit /etc/default/saned, to set sane to run as server:

# Set to yes to start saned
RUN=yes

Edit /etc/sane.d/saned.conf, add the following line to set which subnet you would like to share to:

192.168.1.0/24

Add the saned user to the lp group so it can access the scanner:

sudo adduser saned lp

Restart the saned daemon:

sudo service saned restart

Run the following command and make sure your scanner is installed:

$ scanimage -L

<—– Client Side —–>
Install the required software on the client:

sudo apt-get install sane-utils

Edit /etc/sane.d/net.conf, tell the client where the server is

## saned hosts
# Each line names a host to attach to.
# If you list "localhost" then your backends can be accessed either
# directly or through the net backend. Going through the net backend
# may be necessary to access devices that need special privileges.
# localhost
192.168.1.1